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who come to Britain from Ireland to be "foreigners". The social class profiles of the Irish were almost identical to their British counterparts. And more recent research, commissioned by this paper and published last February, has shown that if anything the contemporary Irish in Britain, like the Asian-British. outperform their indigenous British colleagues, particularly so among women. This evidence points to a very substantial and rapid integration of those of Irish extraction into wider British society. It seems to suggest, that within Britain at least, British governments of various political hues, have not carried out systematic repression of Irish Catholics.
To this evident mixing of peoples, we should add the influence of overlapping popular and literary cultures. For example, the impact of British TV (the schedules are carried in every Irish newspaper), the increasing circulation of the British press in Ireland and the Irish press in Britain (the National Union of Journalists organises across both islands, as do some other unions). and shared sporting interests - for football it is more like a common passion. In the realm of literature the mutual influence is so complete as to be almost impossible to disentangle. Such names as Beckett, Burke, Heaney, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, O'Casey, Shaw, Sheridan, Swill, Synge, Wilde and Yeats are, of course, familiar in Britain. While Heaney in his deeply moving tribute to the people of Omagh after the bombing drew at the start on the words of Shakespeare. The title for the piece was based on Wilfred Owen 's line "the eternal reciprocity of tears", while it ended with the visionary challenge of Blake's "GO love without the help of any Thing on Earth". it is beyond doubt that, whatever our differences, British and Irish inhabit a common English-speaking culture which has spread from these islands to cover much of our globe.
This social and cultural intermingling was well summed up in an interesting essay by Garret FitzGerald and Paul Gillespie in Prospect magazine, where they said, "it is evident that to most Irish people, Britain and the British are not abstract political concepts to which they react with historically-conditioned hostility but rather a place and a people with which most of them are familiar, even intimate." And as O'Connell's study revealed, those feelings are mirrored on the British side, even though naturally their experience is more of the Irish in Britain than in Ireland.
Jack O'Sullivan, an English-born, Irish journalist on the Independent, put it like this
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